<Music: Hummel Bassoon Concerto with Performers Terry B. Ewell and Peter Amstuz>
Welcome Music 105 students, this is your brief video on reading notes and rests. Those of you that have had musical experience before will find this video very easy, and you may not even need to view it. But if you are not familiar with how music notes work and rests work, you will find this video helpful.
In music we consider notes and rests to be a fraction. You might think back to when you studied fractions and you have a pie, a pie chart of some sort. So the entire pie in music would represent a whole note. Then fractions of that pie are created. Half of the pie creates half notes. The pie in quarters creates quarter notes. Here we have an illustration of an eighth portion of the pie, and that would be equivalent to an eighth note.
Now I am going to take you to a few brief examples that I have found from teoria.com. This is one of your web link helps that is included on your website. In addition, of course, you will have other readings. So here we have note values in music. In the United States the whole note represents the whole pie. Typically it is given four beats in duration. The half note is half of that pie. It is half of the whole note and therefore is two beats in duration. Then a quarter of the pie is one beat and we give it a quarter note. Notice how the symbols differ here. The whole note is just this circular note head. Added to the note head is a stem that creates the half note. When you fill it in it becomes a quarter note.
So let’s have a look at how this would work in music. The 4/4 time signature is one of the most common time signatures. Of course you will be learning in this course a little bit about time signatures. But let me play for you this example and how it works with the beats going on in the music: with half notes, quarter notes, and then a whole note at the end. Example with music
So in music as we count through—2 3 4 1 2 3 4—you will notice that when the note starts you will hear the start of the tone or what you might call an attack or a beginning of the tone. And then during the duration of that note it is just held. There aren’t any new attacks. For instance, on a piano you would press the key, hold it down and then release it. Press it again, hold it down, and release.
<Example with violin, Dr. Jeffrey Howard.>
With wind instruments we start and stop with the tongue. Ta-ta-ta-ta. Would be the way we articulate them.
<Example with trumpet. Dr. Luis Engelke>
OK, so let’s have a look now at rests. Notes show where there is sound being made. Rests are the way in which we show silence in the music. The rests are given here. The whole rest droops down from the fourth line. Think of it as being heavier than the half rest that is upward from the fourth line. I have a video about the placement of the rests. The quarter rest looks like this. So let’s have an example of music notation with rests and notes. Obviously if we just had rests you wouldn’t hear any notes at all. So let’s hear how this works. Here is a whole rest, quarter rests, and a half rest.
<Example: music>
No sound. ___ rest ___ rest. You can hear the metronome in the background during the rests and notes. Let’s hear that once again.
Very good. So music is made up of notes and rests. You will see that in the musical examples that we have in this course. You will be writing examples such as that. Thank you very much. Bye.
<Music: Hummel Bassoon Concerto with Performers Terry B. Ewell and Peter Amstuz>